The Mandel Files, Volume 2: The Nano Flower

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘How are you at accounts?’

  ‘I shuffled some finance bytes when I was there.’

  ‘Good.’ Eleanor gave Greg a quick kiss and began to steer Andria towards the kitchen. ‘You can help me with our figures. I’m afraid I’m way behind this year.’

  Greg gave Oliver a strong hug. ‘Yes, I was up there, and so was Aunty Julia.’

  ‘The sailing star is an aspect of Gaia, isn’t it, Dad?’ Anita asked urgently. She threw a contemptuous glance at Oliver. ‘One of her angels come to show us the path to redemption.’

  Christine smoothed down the front of her dress. ‘I’m going to wear it to the dance at the Victoria Hall on Saturday. Graham’s asked if he can take me. Mum said I’d have to ask you first. But it’s all right if I go, isn’t it, Dad?’

  ‘Who’s Graham?’

  Eleanor smiled sweetly. ‘Supper will be late, sorry.’ She and Andria vanished into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s an alien monster, and Dad stopped it from eating New London,’ Oliver said hotly, and glared at his twin. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Dad?’

  Greg scooped up Richy, who smiled angelically and wrapped his arms round Greg’s neck.

  ‘Dad! Can I go dancing with Graham or not?’

  EPILOGUE

  Julia opened her eyes to pure whiteness, a smooth translucent material centimetres from her nose with sunlight shining through. She stared at it while her thoughts coalesced, as if she was waking. But there had been no sleep, she was sure of that.

  Memories rose, coldly bright, every aspect of her life recalled in meticulous detail, the joy and pain undimmed by time. That was so unfair. Time was supposed to heal human angst. And there had been so much time. Centuries.

  The whiteness brightened, splitting open to show a cloudless sky. She was lying inside an oval cocoon which had a texture of resilient rubber. Sunlight warmed her skin and heavy moisture-laden air rolled in. There was the distinctive sound of waves breaking on a beach. She sat up.

  It was a beach, a long, curving cove with gingery sand and beautifully clear water. She could see a rocky headland about three kilometres away to her left; on the other side there was a dark line of cliffs stretching into the distance. The bluff behind her was littered with big boulders, narrow wind-blown buttresses of sandy soil gripping them tight. Blades of tough-looking reed grass struggled for a toehold above the sand, growing into a thick wiry mat at the top of the bluff. Beyond that was a band of dense vegetation. The trees were unusual, each of them had five equally spaced slender grey trunks, gradually curving inwards, their tips meeting at the centre of the pentangle. A clump of mossy indigo foliage foamed out around the conjunction, with long ribbons dangling down to the ground. She shivered in dark delight at the sheer alienness of the world.

  Five metres away was another cocoon. She waited as its top dilated, then Royan sat up.

  They embraced on the sand between the two cocoons, spending a long time just looking at each other, hands constantly touching and stroking for reassurance. Finally she held his gaze, and screwed her face up. ‘That was a bloody silly thing to do. Didn’t you ever read War of the Worlds?’

  He grinned. ‘Brought us together in the end, didn’t it, Snowy?’

  She groaned in mock-outrage, and hugged him tighter.

  He craned his neck, searching the sky.

  ‘There.’ She pointed back over the jungle. A brilliant star hung above the tree tops.

  ‘Where it will go now?’

  ‘I’ll find it a world of its own, that was the deal. The SETI division had compiled quite an extensive list of local stars confirmed to possess planetary systems. I accessed the file before we left New London.’

  ‘Good old Rick.’

  ‘Yes.’ She took another look round the beach, and rubbed her arms absently. ‘It’s going to be cold at night.’

  ‘The nanoware will make you some clothes, they’ll make you anything as long as they’ve got the right raw material to process.’

  She glanced down at the white organisms. Both of them had closed up, shrinking slightly now there was no body to accommodate. If she concentrated she could feel their presence in her mind, an obedient animal-sentience, waiting for orders.

  ‘I wonder what happened to me … her, afterwards?’

  ‘We can always go back and see.’

  ‘No,’ she said with a sigh. ‘It was just a dream. This is our world now.’

  Royan slipped his arm around her waist. ‘Shall we take a look around?’

  The image of a planet seen from space filled her mind, strange continents, deep oceans dotted with long island chains, and large dazzling white polar caps. She had always adored the recordings of Earth’s ice-bound continent, ruing the fact she would never see it.

  Exploring this planet would take a lifetime. The two of them would do it together, alone, and free of any obligations. The way it could never be on Earth.

  ‘Sounds good,’ she said.

  They started to walk along the beach towards the headland. After a minute, the nanoware organisms stirred themselves, and began to slither dutifully after them.

  BY PETER F. HAMILTON

  Pandora’s Star

  Judas Unchained

  THE VOID TRILOGY

  The Dreaming Void

  The Temporal Void

  The Evolutionary Void

  THE NIGHT’S DAWN TRILOGY

  The Reality Dysfunction

  The Neutronium Alchemist

  The Naked God

  THE GREG MANDEL TRILOGY

  Mindstar Rising

  A Quantum Murder

  The Nano Flower

  Fallen Dragon

  Misspent Youth

  A Second Chance at Eden

  The Confederation Handbook

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PETER F. HAMILTON is the internationally bestselling author of numerous short stories and novels, including the Void series (The Dreaming Void, The Temporal Void, and The Evolutionary Void), Judas Unchained, Pandora’s Star, Fallen Dragon, and the acclaimed Night’s Dawn trilogy: The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God. He lives in Rutland, England, with his family.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  GREAT NORTH ROAD

  by Peter F. Hamilton

  Coming from Del Rey Books

  Friday, February 1, 2143

  Most of the expedition pilots were toxed up with HiMod to keep them sharp and push them through their natural sleep cycle without the chem-buzz of a street stim. Ravi Hendrik didn’t bother with analeptics. No need, not even now he was pushing fifty. As to why so many of his fellow pilots had turned users, he didn’t understand at all.

  How could you not stay fresh and focused on this world with this mission?

  Right now the ass-end of a Daedalus C-8000-KT tanker variant was a hundred meters ahead of him, wing flaps extended to keep it just above stall speed. The refueling hose had wound out of its port wingpod, holding fairly steady in the slipstream.

  The refueling probe of Ravi’s European Aircraft Corporation CT-606D Berlin heavylift helicopter was fully extended now, and he eased the big machine forward to make contact. Up ahead, the traffic lights below the tanker’s refueling pod switched from red to double green. The long receiver pole that had telescoped out from just below the Berlin’s nose thrummed in the down-draft from the contrarotating coaxial blades, powered by twin high-speed, high-temperature turbines a meter above and behind Ravi’s head.

  He lived for this. A man in tune with his machine, flying with a purpose. Ease the shaking brute forward, anticipate the slipstream oscillation, match it, don’t forget the unwieldy inertia from the ’dozer dangling seven meters beneath the fuselage and … squeeze the ergo-joystick to slide that fucker in. Three blue lights shone bright on the windscreen display as the locks engaged.

  “Got it,” he told the fuel supervisor on board the Daedalus.

  “Roger that. Seal confirmed. Beginning transfer.”

  Ravi
’s free hand flicked a gang victory sign at the lumbering plane in front. Oh yeah, the old master scores a first-time clean entry. Again. Symbols on the screens showed him the JB5 biav flowing into the Berlin’s depleted tanks.

  He monitored the stress on the receiver pole through an icon in his netlens glasses grid. The weight of the new fuel would change the Berlin’s performance and balance, and with that ’dozer playing hell with his drag, he couldn’t afford to slacken off. Now this, this was the kind of true flying you just couldn’t hand over to some bastard autopilot, no matter how much poncy AI code you crammed into its silicon.

  Grinning wildly, he took a glance out of the curving cockpit to check how Juan-Fernando was doing. The other Berlin was closing on the starboard refueling hose. Below the helicopter, hanging on near-invisible cables, was a bright yellow JCB compactor, looking utterly surreal as it zoomed over a StLibra jungle at close on 250 kph.

  Juan-Fernando missed his first attempt.

  “Oh yeah.” Ravi flicked another sign at his pathetic loser of a colleague. “Say my name, dipshit, say my n-a-m-e,” his voice called above the voluble cabin noise. He could just imagine Juan-Fernando’s dismay. The other two Berlins in the flight, waiting their turns to suckle at the Daedalus, would have seen the miss also. Ravi’s fellow pilots would be buying him a lot of drinks when they got back to civilization tomorrow night.

  The ferry flight had made more than half the distance from Abellia to Edzell, the first advance base that was being carved out of the jungle 2,700 kilometers straight north of Abellia. Eight hundred kilometers left to go, and Ravi would be lowering the ’dozer down into the clearing. An overnight stay and then tomorrow a fast flight back to Abellia to pick up more outsized equipment.

  First priority for the HDA engineering corps at Edzell was to use the dozers and compactors to carve a runway out of the wild ground for the Daedalus planes, whose design allowed them to land on some pretty rough surfaces. Once that strip was established, the big planes would take over supplying the base and expanding it to full operational status, but until then it was all dependant on the Berlins. Ravi and the helicopter pilots were the pioneers everyone else was depending on to pull off this truly wild schedule. The whole expedition, from the vice commissioner down to the catering staff, was following this flight in real time, admiring their ballsy skill. Right now his neurons were pumping him a high no tox could match. Oh yes.

  The Berlin’s tanks filled to their capacity, and Ravi disengaged, sending the Berlin curving away, making room for Greg in the number-three bird, who was carrying another of the five-ton ’dozers.

  The weather radar display shining across the cockpit canopy showed the afternoon storm as a giant red wave sweeping in from the southeast. If nothing went wrong they should just be able to outrun it. Any kind of weather forecast on StLibra was a boon. Without satellites they were as close as Ravi had ever been to flying blind. Thankfully the e-Rays provided some coverage along the flight path to Edzell, but this zooming-into-the-unknown form of piloting was all part of the great game.

  “Smooth,” Tork Ericson called above the turbine whine and gearbox growl that saturated the cabin—military birds weren’t big on soundproofing. He was an aviation engineer, sitting in the copilot’s seat today to help with the abnormal load.

  “Riding this gig is cool,” Ravi told him as the Berlin settled down to its cruise speed of 275 kph, considerably lower than its usual because of the ’dozer.

  “But not as cool as a Thunderthorn,” Tork supplied.

  “You got it.” In his glorious youth Ravi Hendrik had flown SF-100 Thunderthorns, the HDA’s first line of defense against Zanthswarms. And Ravi had been a newly qualified pilot, eighteen months out of HDA flight school, when the New Florida Zanthswarm began. He’d flown mission after mission above that doomed world. Nothing in his professional or private life since had come close to matching the sheer terror and exhilaration of those three weeks.

  The HDA had reassigned him away from his beloved SF-100 when he was in his late thirties. Younger pilots were coming through the academy, boys and girls with hunger to kill the Zanth, with faster reflexes and more up-to-date systems knowledge than that sad old-timer Ravi Hendrik. They didn’t have the real-life experience, but that counted for shit in these days of virtuals. So Ravi was assigned to support flying duty as the clock ticked down to pension time—still extremely important work, his squadron commander insisted, even though he was older still and knew exactly what a load of bullshit he was feeding to resentful sidelined ex-hero pilots.

  It was a Bad Thing, he knew, but Ravi wanted every day to be a Zanthswarm day, allowing him to fuck the enemy with D-nukes that he launched, that he detonated amid the terrifying rifts through spacetime. The universe’s greatest power trip.

  But even he had to admit this crazy expedition was pretty hot. A good swan song for his career.

  The alien jungle stretched out to the horizon in all directions, lush glaucous vegetation clinging to every hill and ravine. The plants possessed a unique vitality, clogging tributaries until they swamped, forming clifflike sides along the deep, faster-flowing rivers. Giant, palmlike trees stabbed upward, towering thirty to forty meters above the main canopy like green impaling spikes waiting for the Berlin flight to make one mistake. Vines festooned the gaps over steep gorges. Bubble-bushes, a pink-hued scrub that grew in clusters across any sodden area, thronged the folds creasing the mountainsides where misty streams trickled downward. Waterfalls spewed white from rock precipices, falling for an age into deep pools. Thick tattered braids of cloud meandered along valleys and around peaks. Away to the west, the land rose in a vast massif that created an even more rugged-looking plateau country beyond—as yet unnamed. Who had the time?

  “Man, this is one mean bushworld,” Tork said.

  Ravi nodded. He got it. Traveling like this, low and slow over land where no human had ever been before, and likely as not never would again once the expedition was over, made him very conscious of how far they were from civilization. More important, how far from help if anything went wrong. The expedition had some Sikorsky CV-47 Swallows, including a fully equipped medevac version. But even Ravi had to question how useful they’d actually be at plucking casualties out of this remote verdant wilderness.

  The last Berlin finished refueling, and the Daedalus retracted its multitude of flaps neatly back into its wings, returning them to a clean supercritical airfoil lifting surface. It started to climb to a more comfortable altitude, banking hard to starboard as it did so, heading back to Abellia. Far below, Ravi and the other three helicopters flew onward over the unending jungle. Communications to Abellia were routed via relay packages in the six e-Ray AAVs (Autonomous Airborne Vehicles) that were strung out across the gulf between Abellia and Edzell, flying tight, high-altitude loiter patterns. It had taken four days to position the e-Rays, which had gone on to perform preliminary scans to plot out the basic features of the land. Once the expedition had some rough cartographic details to work with, a squadron of the smaller Raytheon 6B-E Owls had flown out to begin a more detailed examination of the area with specialist ground-mapping sensors.

  A two-kilometer flat zone close to water and with low bush coverage had been found with relative ease. Once conditions were confirmed by the Owls, a couple of Berlins had flown out to drop preliminary camp equipment and a detachment of engineers—along with a full Legion squad for protection. None of the Owls had detected any alien animals, not even insects, but Maj. Griffin Toyne, who was head of expedition security, wasn’t taking any chances. They were here to find potentially hostile aliens; he didn’t want them finding the expedition first.

  After eight straight hours of flying, and placing more trust than Ravi found comfortable in their inertial guidance system, he spotted the lake. It was at the base of a wide gentle valley that was clear of jungle, with just a few lone bullwhip-trees standing among the wispy amethyst-shaded grass. Sunlight shimmered on the long serpentine patch of water fed by a river
at the head and leaking away into a broad swamp six kilometers away at the lower end. The cluster of silver domes above the lakeshore made an incongruous sight amid the pervasive color wash of StLibra’s abundant flora. Two Berlins were sitting beside the shelters. Legionaries patrolled the loose perimeter of the camp, including the eighty-meter stub of raw earth that a lone ’dozer had cleared.

  Clouds were already crawling across the sky as Ravi brought the Berlin to a hover over the end of the infant runway. Ragged shadows slipped toward him across the valley. HDA engineers scuttled underneath the big helicopter, holding their sun hats in place against the downwash. The senior loading officer on the ground guided him down, and the ’dozer touched the earth. Tork released the cables, earning a thumbs-up from the ground crew. Ravi peeled away to find a landing site.

  Later, after he’d had a rest, he’d help unload the remainder of the equipment and supplies the Berlin had brought, along with the fresh food. They could barbecue the burgers and sausages this evening, enjoying a tropical sunset without the usual insect attack that plagued most of the transstellar planets. As he settled the big copter, he saw the blades on the parked vehicles start to turn as the turbines were fired up. The crews were desperate to get airborne before the bulk of the storm hit Edzell. They had at best seven hours of daylight left, including a refueling rendezvous with the Daedalus tanker, so they’d be finishing the flight back to Abellia in darkness. Ravi grinned approval at that—more skilled flying required.

  He throttled the turbines back and initiated the general power-down sequence. Raindrops began to splash across the bulging cockpit windscreen. It was growing dark outside; the twirling mass of cloud had already veiled the sun. Tomorrow he’d be sitting about waiting for the next Berlin flight to arrive before he could leave. That gave him several hours to scout around and get a feel for the territory. Maybe the engineers would allow him to drive one of the ’dozers. It was a grand time to be alive.